Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection: 1/6 (58 page)

“Rose?” Christian’s voice brought me back to myself. “We’re here, I think.”

The plaza consisted of a wide, open area in front of a shopping center. A café was carved into a corner of the main building, its tables spilling out into the open area. A crowd moved in and out of the complex, busy even at this time of the day.

“So, how do we find them?” asked Christian.

I shrugged. “Maybe if we act like Strigoi, they’ll try to stake us.”

A small, reluctant smile played over his face. He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d thought my joke was funny.

He and I went inside. Like any mall, it was filled with familiar chains, and a selfish part of me thought that maybe if we found the group soon enough, we could still get in shopping time.

Christian and I walked the length of it twice and saw no signs of our friends or anything resembling tunnels.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong place,” I finally said.

“Or maybe
they
are,” suggested Christian. “They could have gone to some other—wait.”

He pointed, and I followed the gesture. The three renegades sat at a table in the middle of the food court, looking dejected. They looked so miserable, I almost felt sorry for them.

“I’d kill for a camera right now,” said Christian, smirking.

“This isn’t funny,” I told him, striding toward the group. Inside, I breathed a sigh of relief. The group clearly hadn’t found any Strigoi, were all still alive, and could maybe be taken back before we got in even more trouble.

They didn’t notice me until I was almost right next to them. Eddie’s head jerked up. “Rose? What are you doing here?”

“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled. A few people nearby gave us surprised looks. “Do you know how much trouble you’re in? How much trouble you’ve gotten
us
in?”

“How the hell did you find us?” asked Mason in a low voice, glancing anxiously around.

“You guys aren’t exactly criminal masterminds,” I told them. “Your informant at the bus station gave you away. That, and I figured out that you’d want to go off on your pointless Strigoi-hunting quest.”

The look Mason gave me revealed he still wasn’t entirely happy with me. It was Mia who replied, however.

“It isn’t pointless.”

“Oh?” I demanded. “Did you kill any Strigoi? Did you even find any?”

“No,” admitted Eddie.

“Good,” I said. “You got lucky.”

“Why are you so against killing Strigoi?” asked Mia hotly. “Isn’t that what you train for?”

“I train for sane missions, not childish stunts like this.”

“It isn’t childish,” she cried. “They killed my mother. And the guardians weren’t doing anything. Even their information is bad. There weren’t any Strigoi in the tunnels. Probably none in the whole city.”

Christian looked impressed. “You found the tunnels?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “But like she said, they were useless.”

“We should see them before we go,” Christian told me. “It’d be kind of cool, and if the data was bad, there’s no danger.”

“No,” I snapped. “We’re going home. Now.”

Mason looked tired. “We’re going to search the city again. Even you can’t make us go back, Rose.”

“No, but the school’s guardians can when I call and tell them you’re here.”

Call it blackmailing or being a tattletale; the effect was the same. The three of them looked at me like I had just simultaneously gut-punched them all.

“You’d really do that?” asked Mason. “You’d sell us out like that?”

I rubbed my eyes, wondering desperately why I was trying to be the voice of reason here. Where was the girl who’d run away from school? Mason had been right. I had changed.

“This isn’t about selling anyone out. This is about keeping you guys alive.”

“You think we’re that defenseless?” asked Mia. “You think we’d get killed right away?”

“Yes,” I said. “Unless you’ve found some way to use water as a weapon?”

She flushed and didn’t say anything.

“We brought silver stakes,” said Eddie.

Fantastic. They must have stolen them. I looked at Mason pleadingly.

“Mason. Please. Call this off. Let’s go back.”

He looked at me for a long time. Finally, he sighed. “Okay.”

Eddie and Mia looked aghast, but Mason had assumed a leadership role with them, and they didn’t have the initiative to go on without him. Mia seemed to take it the hardest, and I felt bad for her. She’d barely had any real time to grieve for her mother; she’d just jumped right on board with this revenge thing as a way to cope with the pain. She’d have a lot to deal with when we got back.

Christian was still excited about the idea of the underground tunnels. Considering he spent all his time in an attic, I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

“I saw the schedule,” he told me. “We’ve got a while before the next bus.”

“We can’t go walking into some Strigoi lair,” I argued, walking toward the mall’s entrance.

“There are no Strigoi there,” said Mason. “It’s seriously all janitorial stuff. There was no sign of anything weird. I really do think the guardians had bad information.”

“Rose,” said Christian, “let’s get something fun out of this.”

They all looked at me. I felt like a mom who wouldn’t buy her kids candy at the grocery store.

“Okay, fine. Just a peek, though.”

The others led Christian and me to the opposite end of the mall, through a door marked STAFF ONLY. We dodged a couple of janitors, then slipped through another door that led us to a set of stairs going down. I had a brief moment of déjà vu, recalling the steps down to Adrian’s spa party. Only these stairs were dirtier and smelled pretty nasty.

We reached the bottom. It wasn’t so much a tunnel as a narrow corridor, lined in grime-caked cement. Ugly fluorescent lights were embedded sporadically along the walls. The passage went off to our left and right. Boxes of ordinary cleaning and electrical supplies sat around.

“See?” said Mason. “Boring.”

I pointed in each direction. “What’s down there?”

“Nothing,” sighed Mia. “We’ll show you.”

We walked down to the right and found more of the same. I was starting to agree with the boring assessment when we passed some black writing on one of the walls. I stopped and looked at it. It was a list of letters.

Some had lines and
x
marks next to them, but for the most part the message was incoherent. Mia noticed my scrutiny.

“It’s probably a janitor thing,” she said. “Or maybe some gang did it.”

“Probably,” I said, still studying it. The others shifted restlessly, not understanding my fascination with the jumble of letters. I didn’t understand my fascination either, but something in my head tugged at me to stay.

Then I got it.

B
for
Badica
,
Z
for
Zeklos
,
I
for
Ivashkov
. . .

I stared. The first letter of every royal family’s name was there. There were three
D
names, but based on the order, you could actually read the list as a size ranking. It started with the smaller families—Dragomir, Badica, Conta—and went all the way up to the giant Ivashkov clan. I didn’t understand the dashes and lines beside the letters, but I quickly noticed which names had an
x
beside them: Badica and Drozdov.

I stepped back from the wall. “We have to get out of here,” I said. My own voice scared me a little. “Right now.”

The others looked at me in surprise. “Why?” asked Eddie. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you later. We just need to go.”

Mason pointed in the direction we’d been heading. “This lets out a few blocks away. It’s closer to the station.”

I peered down into the dark unknown. “No,” I said. “We’re going back the way we came.”

They all looked at me like I was insane as we retraced our steps, but nobody questioned me yet. When we emerged from the mall’s front, I breathed a sigh of relief to see that the sun was still out, though it was steadily sinking into the horizon and casting orange and red light onto the buildings. The remaining light would still be enough for us to get back to the bus station before we were really in any danger of seeing Strigoi.

And I knew now that there really were Strigoi in Spokane. Dimitri’s information had been correct. I didn’t know what the list meant, but it clearly had something to do with the attacks. I needed to report it to the other guardians immediately, and I certainly couldn’t tell the others what I’d realized until we were safely at the lodge. Mason was likely to go back into the tunnels if he knew what I did.

Most of our walk back to the station proceeded in silence. I think my mood had cowed the others. Even Christian seemed to have run out of snide comments. Inside, my emotions swirled, oscillating between anger and guilt as I kept reexamining my role in everything.

Ahead of me, Eddie stopped walking, and I nearly ran into him. He looked around. “Where are we?”

Snapping out of my own thoughts, I surveyed the area too. I didn’t remember these buildings. “Damn it,” I exclaimed. “Are we lost? Didn’t anyone keep track of which way we went?”

It was an unfair question since I clearly hadn’t paid attention either, but my temper had pushed me past reason. Mason studied me for a few moments, then pointed. “This way.”

We turned and walked down a narrow street between two buildings. I didn’t think we were going the right way, but I didn’t really have a better idea. I also didn’t want to stand around debating.

We hadn’t gone very far when I heard the sound of an engine and squealing tires. Mia was walking in the middle of the road, and protective conditioning kicked in before I even saw what was coming. Grabbing her, I jerked her out of the street and up against one of the building walls. The boys had done the same.

A large, gray van with tinted windows had rounded the corner and was headed in our direction. We pressed flat against the wall, waiting for it to go past.

Only it didn’t.

Screeching to a halt, it stopped right in front of us, and the doors slid open. Three big guys spilled out, and again, my instincts kicked in. I had no clue who they were or what they wanted, but they clearly weren’t friendly. That was all I needed to know.

One of them moved toward Christian, and I struck out and punched him. The guy barely staggered but was clearly surprised to have felt it at all, I think. He probably hadn’t expected someone as small as me to be much of a threat. Ignoring Christian, he moved toward me. In my peripheral vision, I saw Mason and Eddie squaring off with the other two. Mason had actually pulled out his stolen silver stake. Mia and Christian stood there, frozen.

Our attackers were relying a lot on bulk. They didn’t have the sort of background we had in offensive and defensive techniques. Plus, they were human, and we had dhampir strength. Unfortunately, we also had the disadvantage of being cornered against the wall. We had nowhere to retreat to. Most importantly, we had something to lose.

Like Mia.

The guy who’d been sparring with Mason seemed to realize this. He backed off from Mason and instead grabbed her. I barely saw the flash of his gun before its barrel was pressed against her neck. Backing off from my own adversary, I yelled at Eddie to stop. We’d all been trained to respond instantly to those kinds of orders, and he halted his attack, glancing at me questioningly. When he saw Mia, his face went pale.

I wanted nothing more than to keep pummeling these men—whoever they were—but I couldn’t risk this guy hurting Mia. He knew it, too. He didn’t even have to make the threat. He was human, but he knew enough about us to know that we’d go out of our way to protect the Moroi. Novices had a saying grilled into us from an early age:
Only they matter
.

Everyone stopped and looked between him and me. Apparently we were the acknowledged leaders here. “What do you want?” I asked harshly.

The guy pressed his gun closer to Mia’s neck, and she whimpered. For all her talk about fighting, she was smaller than me and not nearly as strong. And she was too terrified to move.

The man inclined his head toward the van’s open door. “I want you to get inside. And don’t start anything. You do, and she’s gone.”

I looked at Mia, the van, my other friends, and then back to the guy. Shit.

NINETEEN

I
HATE BEING POWERLESS. AND I hate going down without a fight. What had taken place outside in the alley hadn’t been a real fight. If it had—if I’d been beaten into submission . . . well, yeah. Maybe I could accept that. Maybe. But I hadn’t been beaten. I’d barely gotten my hands dirty. Instead, I’d gone quietly.

Once they had us sitting on the floor of the van, they’d bound each of our hands behind our back with flex-cuffs— strips of plastic that cinched together and held just as well as anything made of metal.